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Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter, which is a fairly surprising thing. I try to not post about India but this is kinda important and has to do with the US so here we go.
In the h1b debate, the point about country caps for skilled migration in the US recently picked up a lot of steam. Trump appointed Sriram as Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and his tweets about the removal of h1b caps caused a lot of chaos. David Sacks and the entirety of the tech platoon was defending Sriram, the removal of country caps and ultimately sacks tweeted that Sriram will not control the vias issues since his department is AI.. Many also pointed out Srirams tweet where he openly advocates for active IQ Shredding. Spandrell who coined the term IQ shredders as an example makes a case against such migration as in the end both nations lose bio capital, sriram for instance believes America to be an idea over a people and is fine with all smart Indians leaving en masse which will drop the average iq permanently here. They won't have kids in the US either and the US will have to keep incentivising more people to join to keep up the rate of tech innovation.
India has the highest wait times for h1b visas due to having had IT sweatshops and plenty of fraudsters hustle the legal immigration route. You see most H1Bs coming from three states of 29 here and IT sweatshops which make the backbone of the Indian IT sector indulging in absolute fraud to the point of regular fines spanning more than a decade, fun fact, the founder of Infosys is Former English Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Father in law. It is a difficult thing, India itself has had anti-migration sentiments within the country as the largest IT hub Bangalore has people routinely asking for fewer migrants as they are not Kannadigas, the local ethnic group.
The political class, however, was unanimously criticising it. Blake Masters, another Theil Capital person turned politician, even asked for the total removal of H1Bs and only keeping O1 visas. All factions of the right did this, including Andrew Torba, Zionists like Laura Loomer, dissidents like BAP, Captive Dreamer and ofc Groypers.
Full disclosure, I am an Indian guy who is in tech, I am still in my home country and cannot comment on this topic without being called a self-hating Indian. India has fat tails and a lot of Indians are not politically scheming migrants, at least not the competent ones. I can't lie about this on an anonymous forum here since I don't like lying but inevitably I also cannot say this publicly as I don't want decent people to get cornered. I am an Indian dude who very likely may migrate after all. It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans. The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power, anyone who is smart will be made to live as a nerd and might as well be a nerd doing cooler stuff in a better society than live here and be treated like garbage.
Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b but the most likely outcome will still be more Telugus and other south Indian states having a small number of sweatshops gaming the migration in the US even harder like Gujarati and Punjabis in Canada and rest of the anglosphere.
I don't really see the appeal for a lot of these migrants coming to the west. Indians who could be making 2000 dollars a month which goes a very long way in India become underpaid engineers in the UK where their after tax salary ends up being 3000 dollars which barely covers rent. My Indian colleagues love sharing photos of the beautiful houses they grew up in, their gardeners bringing in daily tropical fruit and all the family life they have back home. In their new country they live in a cramped apartment in a semi-ghetto.
My predictions is that we are going to see an exodus to India which won't just consist of Indians. Northern European weather is awful, taxes and regulations are high and the cost of living is through the roof. It is better to move to your Indian employees than to move Indians to Europe.
I've recently immigrated from a developed nation to Malaysia for a variety of reasons, and whilst I do agree that frequently a skilled professional is probably losing out in purchasing power by immigrating it's understating how hard it can be to get through the original junior ranks in less developed economies and how brutal the work-life expectations frequently are. It's also frequently ironic that Indians who are enthusiastically arguing for quotas in the West are also likely to be victims of a huge, messy internal Idpol system of caste-based quotas that make it difficult to get on the proverbial treadmill as an upper-middle class scion. Malaysian Chinese also find themselves in a similar spot where there's very-strong preferential hiring and university placement domestically for Malays/Muslims which makes it difficult for fresh grads to get anywhere. And if they're fortunate enough to get into the local chapter of whatever elite Consultancy there's literal 120 hour workweeks.
Not directly related, but I find the whole argument around H1B damaging 'competitiveness' to be absurd when the majority of workers even in tech are still firmly in the bullshit job sphere. I'm paid very well for my digital role, but if my company were hit by a meteor tomorrow the world would not especially notice or care. Yes H1Bs might be able to claim high salaries but having more button-maintainers for the Facebook mines doesn't strike me as particularly beneficial.
While Malaysia is poor, KL is a relatively developed city with a high-for-the-developing-world median income and very developed public services. It's nicer than Bangkok, in my opinion, very clean in the nice parts. A problem is the traffic, but it's no worse than LA. You can absolutely live a first-world-tier lifestyle in KL, especially given the low rents, on a modest (for the US) income.
The issue is more that for most people from developed nations there are no jobs that would hire them at those incomes in KL other than maybe being an English teacher at a private school (where there are many candidates). There are enough PMC Malaysian Chinese in the West who would gladly move back to KL for a job paying more than say (US) $80-90k in a heartbeat. Why would you hire someone with no background/family in Malaysia? I know a couple of Europeans out there who do well, but all are married into wealthy Malaysian families (one converted to Islam for his Malay wife, the other married a Chinese Malaysian woman whose family owns a big brokerage).
My wife's originally from a part of Malaysia just outside of Kuala Lumpur (and plugging into her upper middle class Chinese family network makes the financial/cultural shift way more manageable than if I was proverbially fresh off the plane). Having spent a decent amount of time throughout SEA & other digital nomad hubs (Vietnam, Bali, Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore etc), I think Malaysia's prettymuch the perfect mid-point in terms of expenses, development and cultural vibes. Main issue I could see with Malaysia, ignoring the local economy, is the lack of a night life, which isn't really an issue for me with a young family.
My wife and I are both fortunate to have fairly niche skillsets/equity in remote-friendly companies that let us continue to earn international Western rates with reasonably strong job security, but interacting with my wife's younger siblings I can see the difficulties of being a fresh 20-something in Malaysia, especially if you are not Malay. Entry-level/customer service jobs in Selangor pay like 700-1k USD a month. My wife got out through a generous international scholarship which led her into her current role through a fairly circuitous path.
Yeah, there are a few good bars in KL, but it's the standard SEA issue of Australia being a rich country such that the most annoying Aussie tourists/backpackers can ruin the nice places. The places that are more rich international Chinese are better, and far fewer sexpats than practically anywhere else in SEA. Food scene is excellent too, lots of great spas / hotel gyms you can be a member at. Are you white or ethnically Chinese (or something else) yourself? How do you find you're treated when working with locals as a foreigner?
I'm white and far enough off the beaten tourist track that I've literally been questioned about why I'm going where I'm going by Grab Drivers a few times. I wouldn't say I get stared at perse but have had like Mamak workers come and be very curious a few times. The family's super accommodating, which helps. Generally everybody KL-adjacent will have some English, though I'm not a huge fan of KL itself (It's fine but generic SEA capital).
Food is great, my main personal limitation is I can't really train my preferred combat sports since I'm 99th percentile for size in the West.
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